Top 5 Ways to Monetise Social Media
On social media, there are two types of people:
- People who are building a social media audience without a path to monetization
- People who are overly sales focused
The people who have a large audience without monetization methods have an issue – but those who are overly sales focused do as well…
If you are a person who have built your social media pages without a planned way of monetization, you might have consumed blog posts and guides to how you can build your mail list. Because email lists are what’s going to drive sales, right? Well, possibly but not really. At least not if you’re not doing anything further.
Here’s the catch:
The mindset of collecting emails, download your lead magnet etc. is often wrong. Even though it is good to collect people’s email addresses, they won’t do any good if you can’t sell them anything.
When people are being taught this approach without an overall strategy, it’s very easy to become blinded by your own work, just continuing to add followers to your social media pages and subscribers to your email list.
That’s not all
The real challenge is translating your follower count into ROI, not collecting emails or getting them to download your It’s hard to translate that follower count into ROI.
You might have great stats, a large following and traffic generated to your site – but still, you’re struggling with monetizing your social media page.
If you recognize yourself, know that you’re not alone. There are lots of people who have grown large influencing social media pages but still aren’t making a dollar.
Now to the oversly sales focused people
These people don’t often have bad intentions. The only problem is that just like those who don’t have a monetization strategy, they are blindly following a book, and not changing and adapting the tips they’ve learnt into their own reality and situation.
When the overly sales focused people don’t see any success after using the tactics they learned from the book (that should have been tweaked and adapted to their situation), they might be discouraged in continuing while the reality is that the only thing needed is a changed mindset when it coms to monetization.
The issue?
The small problem with these tactics is that they lead to short-term quick money-making strategies – which both harm your authority and are easy to see through, resulting in harmed trust as well.
How can we actually use this?
There is one thing you need to do in order to be able to monetize your social media pages.
That is: Treat people on internet like real people.
Because that’s exactly what they are.
The accounts you engage with or meet on social media are individuals just like you.
Here comes the part where it’s hard to change mindset:
This may sound super obvious but unfortunately, a lot of social media page builders are seeing followers just like they are displayed on their account – as numbers.
If you have this number-counting mentality on social media, you need to change your mindset quickly if you want to have any success of monetizing your page.
You need to have the mindset that social media is about people, not numbers.
So.. what’s the proper approach?
When having the right mindset and approach of monetizing your social media page, you:
- Know how often you should post on social media
- You won’t Google “How to make a promotional post”
- You know what to post
Why is this important?
There are two major contrasts here.
Instead of blindly following guides and books on how you do something, you trust yourself and follow your gut.
Why?
- Because that’s what a real person does when talking to another person,
- Because that’s what a salesperson does when trying to convince someone to buy something
- Because that’s what you do when talking about a product you’re passionate about
Because you’re not talking to a person face to face, doesn’t mean that person doesn’t exist. By acting like a real person on social media, you can see your audience as humans and then be sensitive enough to know when to ask for money.
How You Can Monetize Your Social Media Page
Here comes the fun part.
When you’ve gotten the correct mindset, you can begin looking at different ways to monetizing your page.
But that’s only once you’ve gotten your mindset right when it comes to seeing people on there for just what they are – people.
Before you can start making money on social media, you need to build brand awareness and a following base, but since you are here, I’m skipping that step, assuming you’ve already completed that step.
If you haven’t building your page and increasing social media brand awareness is key for being able to monetize your account.
1. How To Monetize Social Media: Special offers
Social media can be a great tool for increasing your sales. If used correctly.
With this point, you need to be selling something.
If you aren’t selling something from your page but want to make money from it, selling a physical product is one of the most common ways to do so.
Create a product that is relevant to your niche and that you believe your followers would like. When deciding product, your gut feeling is the best guide. Not some guides or tutorials, because they aren’t adapted for your niche, situation or purpose.
Dell used this special offer tactic on Twitter and found tremendous success. On their sales Twitter account @Delloutlet, they are tweeting special deals and offers with a link and a unique discount code for each Tweet. In this way, they can trace which Tweet generated what.
You can use special deals in a variety of different ways. Only your imagination sets the rules. Finding success is all about uniqueness on social media because if you’re unique, people will be sharing your content.
One smart and effective way is to give unique discount codes to everyone asking for it, get them promote that discount code and the code that has generated the most sales will win a gift card with X amount of dollars on it.
These types of methods are often very effective since people are feeling like they’re getting something out of it, at the same time you’re getting free marketing.
2. How To Monetize Social Media: Become an influencer
If you have a social media page that is more targeted towards you, where people are looking up to you, becoming an influencer might be a good idea.
Social media influencers are basically people with a large social media following and a big influence over people.
Related: How to become an Instagram influencer
The main income from influencer’s social media pages are sponsor contracts from brands.
Why influencer marketing might be a path for you to walk is because influencer marketing has skyrocketed in popularity over the last couple of years. The reason to this is because the laser targeted marketing it offers. Because brands are seeing an extremely high ROI from influencer marketing campaigns, that most marketing sources aren’t able to generate, many of them of course decide to spend more money on it – which means more money for them to collect.
There is als a third way to get in touch with brands without having to do any work. Veloce Network is an influencer directory that connects brands and influencers. Simply sign up for free as an influencer and wait for the brands to contact you.
There are several ways for you to get paid as an influencer:
- Branded posts: Get paid per marketing post you make
- Run a complete marketing campaign with a brand
- Offer post packages: For example 10 posts, 5 posts etc.
- Get your own discount code, promote it and get X% from each product you sell
Of course, there are a bunch of other ways to make money as an influencer on, but those above are the most popular ones.
How can you actually do this?
There are two ways to land these types of “sponsor contracts”.
The first way is to reach out to the brands yourself. If you have a slightly smaller following base, this might be necessary.
It’s very important that you contact brands in your niche, because brands knows the value of running targeted ads and if you have a following base that are interested in bicycles, you shouldn’t contact brands who are selling beauty products.
If you have a larger following base..
If you have a slightly larger following base and are a go-to source within your community, there’s a bigger chance that brands will reach out to you and ask for ad space on your page.
While this entitles less work, it shouldn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t reaching out to brands. Because the more brands you’re promoting, the more you’ll monetize your social media page.
3. How To Monetize Social Media: Advertising
This one might sound exactly like point number 2 but this one demands a website.
If you don’t have a website, you can easily set one up.
To begin with, it’s important that you start creating high-quality content worth visiting because who wants to visit a website with nothing on it?
Secondly, if you’re going to use social media as your main traffic source, you should make your website in the same niche as your social media platforms. For example, if you are sharing makeup tutorials on your social media, that’s also what you want to write about and share content of on your website.
If you didn’t know, social media have th ability to generate some great traffic. Simply add your website link in your social media bios so it’s easy accessible, share content on social media that tempts your followers to visit your website and share links to your site on Twitter. There really are endless ways of promoting your website on social media!
So how can you make money from this?
Now to the most important question: How do you make money from starting a website?
There are several ways, really, but in this point, we’ll go into the world of advertising on your website with Google AdSense.
If you are new to Google AdSense, it is normally the different ads you see when you are visiting websites, for example banner ads on the side of a page.
With AdSense, you get paid each time someone click the ads you display on your website.
Signing up with Adsense is easy. Once you are signed up, you can choose from a variety of different ad sizes and shapes that you can implement on your website. Simply copy the code and add it to where you want to place it.
obviously, the more traffic you have, the more you will make from your ads so promote your website on all your social media platforms consistently.
The great thing with AdSense is that the ads that are shown are individual for each person who visits your site, increasing the chances of someone clicking them because they are relevant for them. For example: If a website visitor of yours just recently looked at shoes, there’s a big chance they will see shoe ads on your website.
4. How To Monetize Social Media: Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing means promoting a brand’s products with your own personal link. This link tracks all purchases made through that link – giving you commission off what you’re selling.
One of the most popular affiliate marketing websites is CJ.com (Commission Junction). Here you can request to join different brand’s affiliate programs and then, if you get approved, start promoting their products with your personal link on your website.
If you have a large following on social media and promote your website actively, you can get some great traffic that can result in sales and cash in your pocket.
5. How To Monetize Social Media: Sell Your Knowledge
If you have a big social media following, there will of course be people wondering how you did it.
Sell courses/webinars where you tell people about all your strategies you’ve used to build your following, what it takes to get to where you are etc.
Just make sure you are providing value, because if you don’t people will get unsatisfied and tell people how unworthy the money your presentation was.
The best part here is that there is generally no need for any investment. Only your own time.
Conclusion
When looking to monetize, it’s important that you have the right mindset. This lays the foundation for everything else.
See your followers as what they are – people, and value them! Don’t just see your followers as a number that you want to increase.
When you have that mindset, you will start going more on your instincts and gut feeling instead on reading some book and following the advice you get blindly.
When ready to start monetizing your page, there are many methods to choose. The important thing here is that you provide something out of value and something that is related to your niche.
